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It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

I don't carry myself as a black person but as a woman that belongs to everybody. After all, it's the general public that made me - not any one particular group. So I don't think of myself as belonging to any particular group and never have.

I never had that thing about being black. If the whole world was like that, maybe there would be more harmony and love.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

I'm here because I stand on many, many shoulders, and that's true of every black person I know who has achieved.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

Learn to love being black.